You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:

1. Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
2. Take it out.
3. Boot it up.
4. If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.

And thankfully for Aldrin and Armstrong, the real Apollo lunar landing experience didn’t suffer from the same issue.

How could you pass up the opportunity man

Let me help:

“, and, in fact, was so well programmed that it was able to adapt and overcome some totally-not-its-fault hardware problems during the last few minutes of the landing sequence to keep the computer running, and land the spacecraft correctly.”

Short summary: A radar system on the first moon lander had an undiscovered design flaw that meant it flooded the computer with interrupts it wasn’t designed for, at the exact wrong time, all the way down from T minus 3 minutes to T minus 40 seconds before it actually had to touch down on the moon. That left the computer without enough processor time to keep up with all the real-time-sensitive duties it was tasked with – notably including flying the fucking spacecraft so it landed on the surface, right side up, in the right place, instead of, say, just falling down and slamming into the moon at a tenth of a mile per second.

So when this flood of interrupts happened, the guidance computer was programmed such that it was able to detect that it wasn’t keeping up with its stuff, for some reason unknown to it. When it realized, it had been programmed to save all its navigation data, reboot itself to a clean state, reload the nav data, and then signal to the astronauts hey I don’t know what’s going on but I got a problem guys I need some help. It happened a few times as those final 3 minutes clicked down, which gave enough time for the astronauts to talk to mission control and sort out some version of what was going on, and they were able to reduce the computational load on the computer by shutting down some stuff they didn’t need it to be doing, i.e. stuff other than flying the fucking spacecraft as I mentioned. And then, happy again, it landed them on the moon, having kept up with everything well enough in the interim to keep the lander doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing.

Basically, its hardware failed it, three minutes before landing, but it was unbothered and kept going and landed successfully on the moon. It is for that reason a legendary piece of engineering. To me at least. I like this stuff.

Here’s another article, also quite good, about another instance of the Apollo guidance computer being awesome beyond any type of reasonable expectation, a few missions later.

Wait, how does that work? Can you do Nix package management on a Debian system or something?

Debian is mine and has been for decades + I’m a little bit happy to see it’s still well represented / well thought of in the community. Everything works, and you can choose new + exciting with headaches sometimes, or old + stable with no headaches but old.

Only real issue is the package management hasn’t kept pace with node / python / go / everything else wanting to do its own little mini package management, and so very occasionally that side is a little bit of a mess

NixOS I would like to try at some point as the core philosophy seems a little more suited to the modern (Docker / pip / etc) era, but I never messed with it

I think no 😕

ActivityPub is so loosely designed (in my opinion as somewhat of an outsider) that the opportunity was squandered to be able to have all different services interact smoothly with each other. It’s basically one little fiefdom per app, and if Pixelfed wants to make itself compatible with Mastodon’s fiefdom, then fine, and likewise for Mbin with Lemmy and etc, but it’s not really “cross compatible” between the whole universe of apps, in the same way as other better-designed protocols like email work, where it’s just “email” with no app specificity to it. It is a shame and a missed opportunity with how the protocol was designed, I think.

I think in general, the fediverse people are working on solutions, but we’re sort of stuck into the present setup which has this not really ideal compartmentalization and there’s not a good way to fix it. Certainly not from the Lemmy side that I’m aware of. Two possibilities though:

• Pixelfed has in-progress work on groups support, which is apparently very close to reality and at which point it should be able to interoperate with both Mastodon and Lemmy, which are the two main fiefdoms at present. And, Dan seems like he takes it pretty seriously the idea of maintaining compatibility all around (incl specifically with Lemmy).
• You can do kbin/mbin, which is more “Lemmy like” and is the best currently-working option I’m aware of for interoperating with Mastodon and Lemmy both (incl following Mrs. Hedge on Pixelfed and also any Lemmy communities). That’s why I am using mbin currently FWIW.

Haha I had exactly the same result. I tried kaizo Mario and couldn’t make it past the first 10-15 seconds.

This GDC talk about the level design for Celeste is a pretty fascinating look at how were the nuts and bolts of making it come out so polished + good

Yeah. SM64 you could say was just a normal game, after the exercise in deliberate punishment that was a lot of the NES library.

I greatly enjoyed James and Mike Mondays showing Metroid; in part 2 around 9:00 in, you can see the part where the real NES begins to set in. It’s a kind of unapologetic unbalanced hardness you don’t really see in mainstream games anymore; now it’s like a niche phenomenon if the game is just deliberately un-fun in sections to help you build character.

Super Mario World

It had by far the best tech and it finally opened up the format to the real potential and then the actual gameplay was for the first time in the series basically just a guided walking tour of all these different areas you could visit and then you got handed a trophy. Pure crap

Super Mario 64 had somewhat the same problem although with somewhat of a challenge from time to time, and with the added excuse that they were breaking new ground on the format and so it made sense for the difficulty curve not to be perfectly tuned and polished. SMW had no such reasons

Ask GPT to rewrite your configuration, check over it with diff to make sure it didn’t do something dumb, bingo bango

I feel like it’s like sports; if you do the game then it’s interesting, but if you’re just observing it as an observer, then it’s sort of pointless.

I have observed live speedruns which are absolutely compelling though, too.

I sorta had that same reaction, yeah. His Super Mario video was endlessly fascinating and then from time to time I would go to watch one of the others and they didn’t seem all that different or exciting. Then yesterday I happened on this one, and for whatever reason, it absolutely hooked me.

Tor’s obfs4 protocol is pretty difficult to block, and it has some other transports that are options if obfs4 is unusable in a heavy censorship regime. This page is a good overview of how to start; with the right transport and bridge setup it’ll be extremely difficult for your ISP to prevent you having access.

You could make your home server a securely-accessed onion site and connect to a remote-access-via-web service you’re running there. That part might be a little challenging (and this process overall may be overkill) but it’d be very challenging for them to block it, I think, so if you’ve tried some things and had no luck, that might be the way to do it.

Be careful obviously

Honestly having GPT write one-off code for you for particular selected pieces (esp ones that require a lot of domain knowledge) works pretty well in my experience

Yes by roughly an order of magnitude

Not sure if it’s retro, but if you haven’t checked out Grand Poo World 2 check it out.

If you are looking to play as opposed to just binge, though, just be warned that it pushes by quite a bit the theoretical limits of how hard a game can even be, and still be fun for people who can get good at it.

I think one of the worst things that happened to internet culture was when “I’m a fellow nerd and I am happy if you made me some free nerd stuff, thank you” got replaced with “I’m a customer and you are making a product for me” mentality. It’s like someone is doing you a favor by joining your Lemmy instance, or running your free software, and it gives you the right to complain to them and demand features or things you want, and you’ll threaten to leave and not bless them with your presence anymore if you don’t.

I see this all the time with Lemmy: People pressuring the devs to do some thing in some particular manner, and them constantly explaining “hey, our time’s not unlimited and we have a large number of priorities, we’ll get to it when we get to it, if you feel strongly about it please do it yourself or hire someone” which is 100% reasonable, and then for some reason that’s a problem.

Does it work out okay with 12 cores purely on CPU? About how fast is the interaction?

I played around a little with Ollama and gpt4all but it seemed to me like it wasn’t fast enough to be useful on pure CPU, but if I could just throw cores at it then I might revisit the issue.

Apologies if you know all this stuff already; I just like talking about it:

NES has more genre creating games than any console in history. PlayStation 1 was a similarly seminal thing, but NES was when the deep magic was written. A lot of its games simply had no predecessors; they were invented from first principles.

The exact choice of titles will depend on your enjoyment level for games that are pretty unpolished from today’s POV, but many of them are good enough to still hold up even now.

History factor: Metal Gear, SMB1, Double Dragon, Metroid, Castlevania

History factor but also still fun: Contra, Legend of Zelda, SMB3

Still fun but also hard as balls: Ninja Gaiden

Wild card: Bionic Commando

Preach

(a) network effects (b) inertia © Matrix is still kind of a pain in the ass

Are all easily more capable to explain it (d) all the users are otherkin